Kathleen Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
by Kathleen Harris
Tomorrow, my husband and I will take our kids to my cousin’s house to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day — or “Irish Christmas,” as he and I enjoy calling it.
I married a damn good man. Jewish by birth and Fairfield County-raised, my husband dove headfirst into a sea of thick New York accents and Irish Catholic attitudes when he first met my extended family. He’s been pressured into shots of whiskey with my burly boy cousins — and my father — on chilly back porches and in dank garages, and he’s tossed them back, willingly, all for the love of his girl.
He once broke his finger while playing football in my cousin Anne’s backyard. (My father threw the offending pass that tipped his finger, but who’s counting, Dad? Ahem.) The story, told and re-told now as cousinly legend, was that the first third of his pointer finger had somehow gone perpendicular to the rest of the digit. Real bad, my cousins still say, wincing as they recall the visual memory. One cousin, Bobby, famously stepped in and said, “Hey, hey, lemme get a look ah-that,” and, while smiling broadly and holding my husband’s pained gaze, snapped the knuckle right back into its joint socket. I heard the shriek from within the confines of Anne’s kitchen as I dried dishes, behind several layers of tempered glass in the paned French doors. Real bad. That bad.
That swollen, dislocated finger finally earned Marc his stripes with my people, and elevated his status from “that guy our cousin keeps bringing around” to “Mawwwwk.” Which, in outerborough-ese, loosely translates as “Marc.” Such a mensch, my fella. He’s still greeted at family gatherings with condolences for “the fing-uh.”
Yet he understands how closely I identify with my New York Irish roots, and how much of my wise-ass, sappy soul was lovingly formed and filled by these kind people in my earliest years. He even suffered permanent nerve damage to an appendage for me, just to get street cred. And he’s come to love them like his own, because he loves me. Damn, that’s sexy. But I digress.
Most extended family parties are hosted by my cousin Jim, who has taken over most of the duties, now that his parents are getting older, and unable to cook for the large group of us. He lives just over the Queens border in Nassau County, a few minutes from where he and my mother grew up in Queens Village, and where his parents still live now.
When we drive to Jim’s house, we pass the exits on the Grand Central Parkway that used to be mine — the ones that we used to take to visit my grandparents when I was a kid, when we used to see people who aren’t here anymore.
The Dutch Colonial row houses blur past my window as we travel the well-known road, and the warmth of familiarity washes over me. My children, plugged into iShit in the back seat, don’t yet know that their roots lie here, snaking under the asphalt of the Grand Central Parkway. Their history simply rushes past them, unrecognized, in segments of vinyl siding, parochial school brickface, and arches of maple tree branches. They don’t see it. They can’t see it. Instead, they stare at their glowing smartscreens until we arrive at my cousin’s house, only looking up instinctively once they feel the lurch of the parking brake as we stop in his driveway.
Both Jim and another of my cousins are retired FDNY firefighters. They survived 9/11, they’ve done their time, they’re tired of the cost of living in the tristate area, and they’re sick of shoveling snow. At our most recent visit, they spoke with my husband about moving down south to the Carolinas, when they’re no longer responsible for looking after their aging parents and in-laws. They’d like to live someplace where a dollar goes farther, where there’s a lot of acreage, and warm weather all year round. No LIE or gridlock alert days — just open stretches of road for them to go out and ride on their Harleys, without stopping every two blocks for a traffic light.
When their parents pass away, when they move down south, and when their children eventually follow suit, the last links to our New Yorker-li-ness will be broken. They’ll leave the five boroughs, and there will only be a few of us left to the outlying areas.
None of us will be from here anymore — not from 216th Street or Davenport Road in Queens Village, not from Carroll Street or Farragut Road in Brooklyn. Not from Park Slope, or Hells’ Kitchen, or Inwood. It strikes me as I write this that two hundred years ago, our ancestors were not yet New Yorkers. And so it shall be again, in a just a few more years’ time, that our children’s children will not identify themselves as New Yorkers, either, in the way that my family and I do now.
For a time, my grandparents and great-grandparents could never think of living anywhere else but New York’s five boroughs, and they admonished their children for ever considering the possibility of moving elsewhere. Suburban aspirations were unheard of. Such declarations defied the code, and made the world seem a much larger, more frightening place. Their generations still held the vestigial sorrow of immigration and dire choices, of doleful farewells from steamer ship gangways, and of distant, foreign shores.
But many of us did leave, as circumstances both required and allowed. My aunts left Brooklyn for New Jersey. Some cousins went to Long Island. My uncle moved north to New Hampshire. My parents moved to Connecticut — a dream they’d had since they were first married. My father wanted a wooded lot without view of neighbors’ homes — or neighbors. He’d lived in too-close quarters for most of his life. He wanted space. He wanted freedom.
When my husband and I were newlyweds, a sudden change in his career offered the opportunity for us to relocate from Manhattan to San Francisco. My family was excited for us, but saddened that we would be so far from home. At a family party, some of my brethren gave Marc a tough talking-to about taking the “baby,” me, a 26 year-old married woman, away from everyone. They were joking, of course, but they felt the strain and snap of those ties, just as I do today. One of my cousins bestowed his indirect blessing, by noting that none of us had ever left, really, and that staying put might not have been what was best for us, in hindsight.
Marc and I moved to San Francisco for a few years, and began a passionate love affair with the West Coast jewel — marveling at its beauty, hiking its hills, dining in the city’s best restaurants, skiing its slopes, and sipping wine from its abundant vineyards on any weekend afternoon we wished. But it was never our home. The ties, the familiarity, the knowing — all beckoned. So we came back.
Today, as my family continues to scatter and widen, a small part of me aches to know that my New York City history is fading. My touchstones will soon be gone. People will die. Houses will be sold. The city blocks that once defined me will now be the settings for other people’s lives. New York feeds and swells on such passages of time. It never pines for its mortal natives, or for its lost lovers.
At a recent visit, my cousins and I gathered around the dining room table and sifted through old photographs together. Some details we remembered — and some were already lost to us. Nicknames and eye colors and street curves that we thought we’d always know when we were children, things once visceral and vital to us, had left us without notice.
We are all that remains, all that is left of one hundred and fifty years of immigration and tenements and city jobs with good benefits, of hustlers and Brooklyn cops and fast talkers. We are nearing extinction. It’s the circle of life, I guess. Or “soi-kel,” as someone in my family would have once said. And no longer does.
